Emergence of relational reasoning
We review recent theoretical and empirical work on the
emergence of relational reasoning, drawing connections
among the fields of comparative psychology, developmental
psychology, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive science, and
machine learning. Relational learning appears to involve
multiple systems: a suite of Early Systems that are available to
human infants and are shared to some extent with nonhuman
animals; and a Late System that emerges in humans only, at
approximately age three years. The Late System supports
reasoning with explicit role-governed relations, and is closely
tied to the functions of a frontoparietal network in the human
brain. Recent work in cognitive science and machine learning
suggests that humans (and perhaps machines) may acquire
abstract relations from nonrelational inputs by means of
processes that enable re-representation.
- Award ID(s):
- 1827374
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10231808
- Journal Name:
- Current opinion in behavioral sciences
- Volume:
- 37
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 118-124
- ISSN:
- 2352-1554
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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